Akamai Technologies, Inc.

What does Akamai Technologies do?

Akamai operates a global distributed platform that delivers web content, blocks cyberattacks, and runs cloud computing workloads. Enterprises pay Akamai to accelerate their websites, protect applications from DDoS attacks and bots, and host compute workloads at the network edge.

Who owns Akamai?

Akamai is a publicly traded company on the Nasdaq under ticker AKAM. Ownership is held by institutional investors and public shareholders. No single entity controls the company.

Is Akamai the same as Akamai Connected Cloud?

Akamai Connected Cloud is the name of the company's integrated platform combining its CDN, security and compute services. It is a product platform, not a separate company.

How much revenue does Akamai make?

Akamai reported $4.21 billion in revenue for full year 2025, up 5 percent year over year. Security was the largest segment at $2.24 billion.

Where is Akamai headquartered?

Akamai is headquartered at 145 Broadway in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the Kendall Square technology district near MIT, where the company originated.

Who founded Akamai?

Akamai was founded in 1998 by MIT professor F. Thomson Leighton, graduate student Daniel Lewin, and classmates Randall Kaplan, Preetish Nijhawan and Jonathan Seelig. Lewin was killed in the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Akamai began at MIT in the mid-1990s. Computer science professor F. Thomson Leighton and graduate student Daniel Lewin developed mathematical algorithms for routing internet traffic to solve the congestion problems of the early web. They entered the MIT $50K entrepreneurship competition in 1997, incorporated the company in August 1998, and launched commercial service in 1999 with early customers including Yahoo.

The company went public on Nasdaq in October 1999 during the dot-com boom, with shares rising more than 400 percent on the first day of trading. The crash that followed was severe. Co-founder Daniel Lewin was killed aboard American Airlines Flight 11 on September 11, 2001, and the stock lost almost all of its peak value. Akamai survived by cutting costs and building recurring enterprise contracts.

Through the 2000s and 2010s the company expanded from web page acceleration into video delivery, streaming, and security. It acquired dozens of smaller companies, including Netli, Speedera's rivals in the CDN space, and Prolexic in 2014 for DDoS protection. The Kona security product line launched in 2012 and grew into the company's second major revenue engine.

In 2021 Akamai acquired Guardicore for roughly $600 million to enter microsegmentation and Zero Trust security. In March 2022 it completed the approximately $900 million acquisition of Linode, a cloud hosting provider, forming the basis of Akamai Connected Cloud. The company has since repositioned itself as a combined delivery, security and compute platform while the legacy CDN business matures.

Akamai publishes annual sustainability reporting covering energy use and emissions across its edge network. The company has set targets for 100 percent renewable energy across global operations and reports emissions data verified by external auditors under Greenhouse Gas Protocol standards. Its distributed platform design reuses existing data center capacity rather than building dedicated facilities in many markets.

Akamai has been named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for cloud web application and API protection in multiple consecutive years. The company also appears regularly in analyst evaluations for DDoS mitigation and edge platforms, and it has been a constituent of the S&P 500 index since 2007.

Akamai has faced criticism over the years for providing services to customers later linked to copyright disputes and for the role of CDN providers in content moderation debates. The company also disclosed in 2023 that it had laid off roughly 3 percent of staff as part of restructuring, with additional smaller reductions since. Security researchers periodically disclose vulnerabilities affecting Akamai products, which the company patches through standard disclosure processes.